This game was always under my radar, I would pick it up and look at box each time I perused the GBA/DS aisle at Gamestop. After awhile it became a bit hard to come by so I ended up renting it from Gamefly. If you are looking for an excellent and cute RPG for your GBA, then look no further!

The story is nothing new, you have your plucky hero Ein, who just happens to be an angel of death with amnesia. You have his plucky female companions, the cutesy Lina, serious Fia, mischievous Serene, and Cierra the crimson witch. Basically Ein was sent to destroy Riviera but he ends up helping the sprites that inhabit the land. The narration of the story is actually handled quite well as your party members are very chatty with their own distinct personalities. They often have witty things to say about each situation and really fill in the back story. There is also an affection meter with each chick in your harem and what girl you end up with is determined by your actions.

What makes this game different from standard RPGs is how game progression is handled. The game is divided into seven levels with six to seven sub-levels contained in each one. There is also a bonus eighth level that can be unlocked by acquiring an in-game item. After each level you return to the home town and can talk to villagers and possibly upgrade your weapons/items. Exploration in the game definitely takes getting used to. You get “Trigger Points” by fighting battles (by the way, there are no random battles; we will get to that in a sec), and have to use those points to explore the levels. Want to look at a chest? You will need to use TP for that. Don’t have any? Well, tough luck no chest for you. This will drive people who want to explore every nook and cranny in a game nuts.

The way to get around that is do well in battle. You get a grade after each battle, the better the grade, the more TP you get. All the battles in this game are scripted. You will meet the same enemies at the same point every time you play. The battle system is pretty standard turn based stuff. Your heroes have an overdrive meter that fills up as they fight for more powerful “Breakout” attacks, and your enemies have something similar called the “Rage” meter. This game also has an odd way to level up. There are no levels per say, you gain stat boosts by using weapons a certain amount of times. The weapons do break and have limited amount of uses. You can also only choose four weapons/items to take with you into battle which adds a good bit of strategy. The weapon breaking thing isn’t all bad because you can go into practice mode to level up your weapons. In practice mode your weapons do not get used up and it can be quite addicting. As soon as I got a new weapon I always went straight into practice mode to level up all my characters with it.

This game has lots of mini-games to determine if you can open a chest or dodge an arrow somebody shoots at you. They are random and usually consist of pressing certain buttons in a certain amount of time. Sometimes they pop up un expectantly and that can cause you to fail and miss out on a cool event. That is what replays are for, I guess.

This game looks like a SNES game with more fluid character animations. The colors are very vibrant, but the backgrounds in some of the levels can get a bit repetitive. Each character has a well drawn portrait that pops up when they talk. The music is very good, especially for a GBA game. There are even some voice samples when characters do their special attacks! If you don’t dig 2D then you might not like the style of this game.

It took me about 22 hours to beat the game including the bonus level. There are tons of unlockables and due to the random nature of the game you won’t see the same thing twice. There are also multiple endings based upon which girl you hook up with at the end. The game has save points galore and you can also suspend play if you need to turn it off for some reason, which I think is an important feature in portable games. I really enjoyed this game, and I am glad I gave it a chance.